FLAG'ELLANTS, the name given to certain bodies of fanatical enthusiasts, who, at various intervals from the 13th to the 16th c., made their appearance in the different countries of Europe, proclaiming the wrath of God against the corruption of the times, inviting sinners to atone for sin by self-inflicted scourgings or flagellations, and them selves publicly enforcing this exhortation by voluntary scourging of themselves, and by other forms of self-castigation. IR large and disorderly bands—frequently headed by priests, and by fanatics in the costume of priests and monks, bearing banners and cru cifixes aloft, their breast and shoulders bare, and their face concealed by a hood or mask, each armed with a heavy knotted scourge, loaded with lead or iron—they marched from town to town, chanting hymns full of denunciations of vengeance and of woe. In the most public place of each town which they entered they threw themselves upon the earth, with their arms extended iu the form of a cross, and there inflicted upon them selves tire discipline of scourging, frequently to blood, and even to mutilation. Each member enrolled himself for 33 days, in honor of the 33 years of the life of our Lord on earth; and all for the time professed entire poverty, subsisting only on alms or volun tary offerings. These fanatical movements, resembling, iu some respects, at least, the religious revivals of our own time, 'recurred at frequent intervals. The/most remarkable, however, are three in number. The first originated at Perugia in 1200, at a time when 'society iu Italy was greatly disorganized by the long continued struggles of the Guelph • and Ghibelline factions. The very disorders of the time prepared the way for religious reaction. Numbers crowded to follow the new cry, until at last the body became so formidable as to draw upon itself the suspicions of Manfred, the son of Frederic II., by whom it was vigorously suppressed. Later offshoots of the party made their appearance in Bavaria, Austria, Moravia, Bohemia, Poland, and France, when to their extravagant practices they added still greater extravagances of doctrine. In virtue of a pretended revelation, they asserted that the blood shed in self-flagellation had a share with the blood of our Lord In atoning for sin; they mutually confessed and absolved each other, and declared their voluntary penances to be a substitute for all the sacraments of the church, and for all the ministrations of the clergy. • The Jews were to them an object of special abhorrence; and this unfortunate race, exposed at all times to every caprice of the popular will, suffered dreadfully from the fnry of the F. in many of the towns of Germany and the Netherlands. In the second outbreak of flagellant ism, about 1349, the outrages against public decency were much more flagrant than at its first appearance. Men and women indiscriminately now appeared in public half
naked, and ostentatiously underwent these self-inflicted scourgings. The immediate occasion of this new outburst of fanaticism was the terror which pervaded society during the dreadful plague know as the Black Death, which Hecker, in his Epidemics of the Middle Ages, describes with terrible fidelity. The same extravagances were again repeated in upper Germany, the provinces of the Rhine, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, and even England. Although rigorously excluded from Fianee, these fanatics effected an entrance into Avignon, then the residence of the popes, when they wer condemned by a bull of Clement VI. The mania gradually subsided; nor do we again find any permanent trace of it till the beginning of the next century. In the year 1414, a new troop of F., locally called Regler, made their appearance in Thuringia and Lower Saxony, renewing and even exaggerating the wildest extravagances of their predecessors. These new fanatics appear to have rejected all the received religious usages, and indeed all external worship, placing their entire reliance on faith and "flagellation." Their leader was called Conrad Schmidt. They rejected not only the doctrines of the church upon the sacraments, but also purgatory and prayers for the dead. Schmidt pretended a divine mission, and proclaimed that the blood of flagellation was the true wedding garment of the gospel; that it was more precious than the blood of the martyrs, and a sure passport to eternal life. The violence of these fanatics drew upon them the severest punishments of the inquisition. Many of them were capitally condemned, and Schmidt himself was burned at Sangerhausen in 1414. Their doctrines, comprised in fifty articles, were condemned in the council of Constance.
These strange extravagances are reprobated by the Roman Catholic church in com mon with all other Christian communities; but Roman Catholics (relying on 1 Con ix. 27, Coloss. iii. 5) hold the lawfulness, and even the meritorious character, of voluntary self-chastisement, if undertaken with due dispositions. practiced without ostentation or fanaticism, and animated by a lively faith and a firm hope in the merits of Christ. This is the self-castigation known under the name of " the discipline"—a form of mortifica tion not unfrequent in the monastic state, and even practiced by lay persons, and these sometimes of the highest rank, both in ancient and in modern times. Compare FOrste mann's Die Christlichen Geisslergesellschaften, Wadding's Annales Minorum F•atrum, Raynaldi's Continuation of Iiaronius, Mosheim's Church History (Soames' ed.), Gieseler's Eirchengcschichte, and Milmau's Latin Christianity.